It is that time of the year again: this is the time when the blawgosphere looks back at the past year and prognosticates what the year ahead holds for the legal industry. Those of you who follow this blog will know that I'm not generally one for reading tea leaves. This year, however, I have decided to share my thoughts on how I think LPM will develop over the next few years, based upon the experiences of other industries and the history of modern project management. I hope you find it interesting and I wish you and yours health, happiness, and success in all of your endeavors in 2012 and beyond.
Table of Contents
A Brief History of
Project Management
LPM Weds Legal-Knowledge
Management
LPM Competencies Defined,
Measured, and Continually Improved
Organizational LPM
Maturity Models Developed
A Baby is Born
Legal-project management (LPM) is still in its infancy. Like
new parents, law firms who have adopted LPM are still shaky on how to best
ensure its healthy development. Because
the discipline is so new, one cannot simply look to the experiences of other law
firms for a model of LPM maturity. There are few if any firms that have successfully
made LPM an integral part of their cultures at all levels and in all domains. Therefore,
when trying to envision what LPM will look like in the future, it is
instructive to look back at how the discipline of project management developed
in other industries. This article examines LPM development from both the individual
and organizational levels and looks to the history of, and current trends in,
project management to attempt to define some characteristics of LPM maturity.
A Brief History of Project Management
Project management has existed in some form since the dawn
of civilization, becoming necessary once groups of people began working
together to plan and accomplish complex objectives they could not achieve
individually.[1]
But project management's modern form was conceived during World War II and
adopted in the post- and cold-war years by the aerospace, construction, and defense
industries. Better tools and techniques
to plan and track work were necessary to manage large, technically complex
projects involving vast sums of money.[2]
The rise of project management as a profession began in the mid-to-late 1960s
with the establishment of professional project-management associations, including
the International Project Management Association (IPMA) and the Project
Management Institute (PMI). They were
dominated by scheduling and cost-control technicians and, not surprisingly, project-management
research in the 50s and 60s was focused on developing scheduling and tracking
tools.[3]
By the 1970s project management had become a distinctive discipline in its own
right and began to spread to new industries.[4]
In the mid-1980s, the discipline of project management
underwent puberty. This was a period of fast, disruptive growth, and boundless
though sometimes directionless energy, in which its features became more fully
defined. Through the creation of industry standards and the development of
certifications, project-management associations integrated experiences from
numerous industries into principles and practices of general applicability.[5]
The advent of the personal computer; and the development of spreadsheet,
scheduling, and other planning software for it; made project-management
techniques more accessible to smaller businesses. Businesses that once believed
project management was not applicable to their industries started to adopt a
management-by-projects approach, applying project-management best practices
across nearly all functional areas and to increasingly lower-value projects.[6]
Project managers in the 1980s started to find themselves
managing multi-disciplinary teams in increasingly project-driven organizations.
Businesses began to see project management as a methodology for responding to
and initiating change. There was a shift in emphasis from project controls and
"hard skills" (such as scheduling and cost control) to front-end analysis (such
as risk identification and value analysis), external factors (such as
stakeholder management and social responsibility), and soft skills (such as
communication and team building). Unfortunately, most companies did not clearly
define project roles and this often led to authority conflicts.[7]
Modern project management entered adulthood in response to
the global recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which pushed companies
into seeking longer-term and more focused business strategies. Project managers
in the 90s were expected to focus more on business objectives, risk management,
and customer acceptance, in addition to the more traditional focus on time,
cost, and performance. Greater emphasis on the use of project charters
increased the authority of project sponsors and decreased many of the political
hurdles that previously plagued project managers.[8]
Businesses and project-management associations began to developed maturity
models to measure and improve business-process and project-management
capabilities.[9]
The trends of the 90s continued to develop through the first
decade of the new millennium. Businesses increasingly viewed project management
as a core competency and began using it to support their strategic objectives
through program and portfolio management processes. Once a high level of
project-management maturity was realized, businesses were able to reduce
management oversight of projects (ensuring projects were done right), which
enabled an elevated focus on cross-program and portfolio management (ensuring
the right projects were done).[10]
Project-management associations have integrated and supported the best
practices from these trends through the release of competency and organization-maturity
models, as well as new standards for program and portfolio management.[11]
Unto a Full-Grown LPM
A study of project management's history, along with observing current macroeconomic trends, suggests a number of characteristics of highly mature LPM systems. Legal organizations with mature LPM capabilities:
- align projects and programs to the
organization's strategic objectives;
- adapt their project-management systems to profit
from changing circumstances in an increasingly connected world;
- have specialized project-management models,
training, and assessments for various practice groups, support functions, and
even certain clients;
- demonstrate highly mature knowledge-management
processes that feed into and draw out of the organization's LPM processes;
- have identified and defined project-management
capabilities and developed metrics and programs for assessing and improving the
project-management competency of its resources; and
- measure the overall LPM maturity of their various domain groups and the organization as a whole.
Each of these characteristics is explored further in the
sections below.
LPM Gets Strategic
Firms with a high level of LPM maturity will integrate
project management with organizational management. Legal organizations will
increasingly adopt portfolio-governance structures and best practices from
other industries and develop methodologies for more efficiently managing groups
of projects and ensuring that they support strategic business objectives. An LPM-driven firm, for example, may perform
project-opportunity assessments and create strategic-project offices and
portfolio-review boards.
LPM Goes Global
Globalization, virtualization, and decomposition of project
work into multiple sub-projects sourced to diverse organizations are creating
new challenges and opportunities for project management. The
internationalization of project management has led to efforts to develop a
global body of project-management knowledge and the International Standards
Organization is actively developing a standard for project management, with
plans to develop portfolio and program-management standards.[12] Global standards will make it easier for
project managers to move between projects, organizations, and geographic
locations. Having a common set of project-management definitions and processes
will help multiple organizations work together on the same projects and create
more efficient tendering processes.
Legal organizations are not immune from globalization. Increasing
numbers of transnational legal projects will contribute to calls for more
uniform commercial law and increased pressure on national and state law
licensing authorities to develop more open multi-jurisdictional practice rules.
In an effort to control legal spend, many businesses are unbundling and
multisourcing the legal services they consume. To remain competitive, legal-service
providers will need to develop LPM processes, mapped to international
project-management standards, that consider and profit from an environment
where they may provide their services as part of a multidiscipline,
multinational, multi-organizational team of law firms, legal-process-outsourcing
companies, litigation-support vendors, legal-staffing agencies, consultancies,
and the client's internal stakeholders.
LPM Specializes
The new global ISO standards for project, program, and
portfolio management will threaten and perhaps supplant established standards.
Professional associations will seek to maintain relevance as standards-setting
bodies by offering credentials and standards focused on specific knowledge-areas
and methodologies.[13]
They will also respond to increased pressure for industry-specific credentials
and standards, as PMI has already done with construction and government
extensions to its Guide to the Project
Management Body of Knowledge.[14]
While it is unlikely that a major project-management-professional association
will develop an LPM standard in the near future, PMI has already established a
Legal Project Management Community of Practice, which has attracted over 1,000
members in its first year.[15]
It will, however, be legal and litigation-support consultancies and
professional associations, who drive LPM specialization.
Already, a number of legal-business consultancies offer LPM
certifications.[16]
In the field of electronic discovery (e-discovery) the sub-specialization of
LPM has begun. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) project has
begun work on developing an EDRM Project Management Framework.[17] The creation of e-discovery certifications is
further driving the development of e-discovery project management by
emphasizing project-management skills in certification exams.[18] The development of domain-specific LPM
standards will occur in other areas of legal and litigation-support practice.
Claims for LPM specialization in specific areas of law, however, will be
constrained by professional-practice rules.[19]
LPM Weds Legal-Knowledge Management
Legal-knowledge management will become a progressively more important
component of LPM. There is a growing awareness in the project-management
community that knowledge is a critical project resource and there is a chorus
of calls to more tightly integrate knowledge management into project-management
processes, with some experts going so far as to suggest breaking knowledge
management out as a separate subject area in project-management standards.[20]
Transferring knowledge in project-driven organizations is made difficult because
projects are of limited duration, often staffed by multinational teams of
project specialists, from multiple organizations and disciplines, brought
together temporarily.
In the law-firm environment, the problem of knowledge
management is further compounded by traditionally hierarchical management
structures and the highly competitive nature of many lawyers. Knowledge
sharing, even if actively encouraged, is often limited in practice. Legal
organizations need to ensure knowledge does not dissipate when the project team
disbands. Organizations with a high
level of LPM maturity will have knowledge management baked into their
project-management processes that draw from and feed into knowledge-management
systems and will create strong incentives to share knowledge.
LPM Competencies Defined, Measured, and Continually
Improved
The success of any LPM effort begins and ends with those
individuals tasked with managing a firm's legal projects. Efforts to hire new
project-management talent and develop the project-management competency of
their existing attorneys and support staff will present firms with the
challenge of how to define, assess, and develop LPM capabilities. Fortunately, models
already exist. For example, PMI publishes the Project Manager Competency
Development Framework (PMCDF) for assessing and developing the competency of
the individual project manager. The PMCDF focuses on industry-neutral, project-management
competence and aligns with PMI's standards for project, program, and portfolio
management. It is meant to be complemented by organization and
industry-specific competence requirements. Law firms will need to develop their
own assessment mechanisms and adapt existing employee performance reviews to
their organization-specific LPM-competency frameworks.
Organizational LPM Maturity Models Developed
As project management takes root in the legal industry, legal
organizations will need some way of measuring and improving their organizational
LPM capabilities. Here too, models already exist. PMI developed the
Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) to provide a means for
organizations to assess their application of project management to best
practices. It provides an organizational view of portfolio, program, and
project management and is aligned with PMI's standards. It does not set forth a
hierarchy of maturity levels. Instead, it defines a continuum of maturity,
emphasizing the alignment of project, program, and portfolio results with
strategic objectives achieved.
While the OPM3 provides a good starting point for firms
looking to develop a model for measuring and improving their LPM capabilities,
there are a number of areas that a legal organization would need to assess that
is not covered in the OPM3. For example, law firms will need to incorporate
into their LPM maturity models their best practices related to
conflict-of-interest avoidance, protection of client confidences, avoiding
violations of UPL statues, and other professional requirements.
Applying Lessons Learned
Knowing some of the characteristics of LPM maturity, and the trends influencing its development, gives law firms guidance on how to cultivate their own LPM systems. The legal industry has just begun the process of learning and applying the project-management lessons of other industries. The focus of most firms thus far has been on either broadly improving the basic project-management skills of the firm's lawyers and support personnel, or intensively developing project management in specific domain areas in the firm. Firms with high-levels of LPM maturity, however, will have spread project-management capabilities deeply and broadly throughout their organizations and will manage projects and portfolios of projects in accordance with the firm's strategic objectives. In this time of great change in the legal industry, firms with mature LPM systems will enjoy a competitive advantage. To achieve this advantage, however, they must begin to plan for LPM maturity. This will require abandoning an attitude of industry exceptionalism and the foresight to look back at what's been done before.
[1] See Mark
Kozak-Holland, The History of Project Management (2011). See also Y.C.
Chiu, An Introduction to the History of Project Management: From the Earliest
Times to A.D. 1900 (2010).
[2]
For more about the history and development of modern project management, see Harold Kerzner, The Growth and Maturity of Modern Project Management, in PMI
Seminars & Symposium Proceedings 697-703 (1996); Patrick Weaver, A Brief History of Project Management: Is
Our Profession 50 or 5,000 Years Old?, Project
(June 2007)[hereinafter Brief History];
Patrick Weaver, The Origins of Modern
Project Management, Mosaic Project Services
(Apr. 2007),
http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/PDF_Papers/P050_Origins_of_Modern_PM.pdf
(last visited Sept. 25, 2011) [hereinafter Origins];
Young Hoon Kwak, Brief History of Project
Management, The Story of Managing
Projects: An Interdisciplinary Approach 1 (Elias G. Carayannis, et al.
eds., 2005); Alan Stretton, A Short
History of Modern Project Management, PM
World Today, Oct. 2007, available
at
http://www.pmforum.org/library/second-edition/2007/PDFs/Stretton-10-07.pdf
(last visited Sept. 19, 2011).
[3] See, Weaver, Origins, supra note 2;
Patrick Weaver, A Brief History of
Scheduling: Back to the Future, Mosaic
Project Services (Apr. 2006), http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Resources_Papers_042.html
(last visited Sept. 27, 2011); Janice Lynne Thomas, Jenny Krahn & Stella
George, Shaping the Future of Project
Management Research, Project
Management Circa 2025, at 129 (David Cleland & Bopaya Bidanda eds.
2009).
[4]
Stretton, supra note 2, at 9.
[5] An
example of this in the United States is the Project Management Institute's
(PMI) ethics, standards, and accreditation project, approved by PMI's board of
directors in 1981, leading to publication of its first project-management
standard in 1983. Special Report: Ethics,
Standards, Accreditation, Project Mgmt.
Q. (Aug. 1983). See also, Project Mgmt. Inst., A Guide to the Project
Management Body of Knowledge 359-360 (4th ed. 2008).
[6] See Kerzner, supra note 2, at 1, 3-6.
[7] See Id.
at 5-7; Stretton, supra note 2, at
11-16.
[8] See Kerzner, supra note 2, at 5-7.
[9] In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of
Carnegie-Mellon University popularized the concept of organization maturity with
its influential "Capability Maturity Model," which influenced the
Organizational Project Management Maturity Model project that PMI chartered in
1998. See Project Mgmt. Inst., Organizational Project Management Maturity
Model 109 (2d ed. 2008)[hereinafter OPM3].
[10]
An interesting case study on the development of enterprise project management
is IBMs use of program and portfolio management to address challenges in its
transformation from a hardware and software company to a high-end services
business. William C. Britton, IBM's
Transformation from Project to Program and Portfolio Management, PMI Virtual Libr. (2007),
http://www.pmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Knowledge-Shelf/~/media/Members/Knowledge%20Shelf/Britton_final_112607.ashx
(last visited Sept. 27, 2011).
[11] E.g., OPM3, supra note 8; Project Mgmt.
Inst., Project Management Competency Development Framework (2d ed.
2002); Project Mgmt. Inst., Standard for
Program Management (2005); Project
Mgmt. Inst., Standard for Portfolio Management (2005).
[12]
ISO/TC 236, Draft International Standard 21500: Guidance for Project Management
(Sept. 6, 2011), available at http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=50003
(last visited Sept. 26, 2011).
[13]
PMI is already doing this with its Agile Certified Practitioner (ACP), Risk
Management Practitioner (PMI-RMP), and Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP)
credentials and its standards for scheduling, project estimating, project
configuration, work-breakdown structures, risk management, and earned-value
management. For a list credentials currently available through PMI, see Certification, Project Mgmt. Inst., http://www.pmi.org/Certification.aspx
(last visited Sept. 24, 2011). For a list of PMI's current library of
standards, see Library of Global
Standards, Project Mgmt. Inst.,
http://www.pmi.org/en/PMBOK-Guide-and-Standards/Standards-Library-of-PMI-Global-Standards.aspx
(last visited Sept. 24, 2011).
[14] Project Mgmt. Inst., Government Extension to
the PMBOK Guide Third Edition (2006); Project
Mgmt. Inst., Construction Extension to the PMBOK Guide Third Edition (2d
ed. 2007).
[15] PMI Legal Project Mgmt. Community of Prac.,
http://legalpm.vc.pmi.org/
[16] E.g., The Certified Project Manager Program, LegalBizDev, http://www.legalbizdev.com/projectmanagement/certification.html
(last visited Sept. 27, 2011);
Certification in Legal Project Management Offered by Hildebrandt Baker Robbins
and the Hildebrandt Institute, HBR
Consulting (Mar. 1, 2011), http://info.hbrconsulting.com/Certification-in-Legal-Project-Management-Offered-by-Hildebrandt-Baker-Robbins-and-The-Hildebrandt-Institute-03-01-2011.
[17] EDRM Evergreen/Project Management, Electronic Discovery Reference Model
(Feb. 1, 2008), http://edrm.net/wiki2/index.php/EDRM_Evergreen/Project_Management;
Project Management Guide, Electronic Discovery Reference Model
(Feb. 1, 2008), http://www.edrm.net/resources/guides/edrm-framework-guides/project-management
(last visited Sept. 27, 2011).
[18] For
example, the Association for Certified Electronic Discovery Specialists
emphasizes project-management skills in its certification exam, with "project
planning" and "project management" being two of the 15 areas of focus tested. Association of Certified E-Discovery
Specialists, Certified E-Discovery Specialist Examination Candidate Handbook 16
(Jun. 2011), available at http://aceds.org/sites/default/files/CEDS-Handbook_2011.pdf#page=16
(last visited Sept. 27, 2011). Project management is also an area tested by the
Organization of Legal Professionals in its certification exam. Organization of Legal Professionals, Certified
E-Discovery Professional Candidate Handbook 11 (2011), available at http://theolp.org/Resources/Documents/OLP.Candidate%20handbook.pdf
(last visited Sept. 27, 2011).
[19] See e.g., Model Rules of Prof'l Conduct R. 7.4(d) (2011)("A lawyer
shall not state or imply that a lawyer is certified as a specialist in a
particular field of law, unless: (1)the lawyer has been certified as a
specialist by an organization that has been approved by an appropriate state
authority or that has been accredited by the American Bar Association; and (2)
the name of the certifying organization is clearly identified in the
communication." While project-management certifications would clearly fall
outside the scope of such rules limiting claims of specialization,
legal-project management specializations and e-discovery certifications could
present more of a gray area, especially those that limit the certifications to
lawyers. The rules of professional conduct in some U.S. states are more
permissive regarding communication of certifications than the ABA rule. For
example, allowing lawyers to communicate the fact that they are certified by a
named organization but requiring a disclaimer if it is not recognized by bar
association or other body governing the practice of law in the state. E.g., Hawaii
Rules of Prof'l Conduct R. 7.4(c) (1994).
[20] The Project Management Association of Japan's standard, for example, places great emphasis on project-knowledge management, with every domain's (i.e., knowledge area or subject) objectives, work processes, and results interfacing with a knowledge database. See Project Mgmt. Ass'n of Japan, A Guidebook of Project & Program Management for Enterprise Innovation (2005), available at http://www.pmaj.or.jp/ENG/index.htm (last visited Sept. 24, 2011). See also Stanislaw Gasik, A Model of Project Knowledge Management, Project Mgmt. J., Apr. 2011, available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pmj.20239/pdf (last visited Sept. 27, 2011); Stanislaw Gasik, Comments on the ISO 21500 Draft Version, Sybena Consulting, at 6, available at http://www.sybena.pl/dokumenty/ISO-21500-and-PMBoK-Guide.pdf (last visited Sept. 24, 2011).
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